SAOC 2.

Hittite Hieroglyphs 1

Ignace J. Gelb

With the death of Prof. Sayce we lose the greatest of the pioneers of research in Hittite hieroglyphs. It was he who laid the foundation-stone of whatever may be correct in the decipherment of these strange characters, and although it must be allowed us to say that he let his imagination run away with him, it was this very imagination which enabled him to assign what are probably correct values to about a dozen characters, and those dozen characters must be considered a heroic achievement for a pioneer. Doubtless in future days, when the script is an open book, the young Hittitologist will look back with an amused and superior smile at the errors which his great-grandparents made in their blind-bull-like rushes. With the large number of clear inscriptions discovered by the British Museum excavations at Carchemish, research into Hittite hieroglyphs has received a fresh impetus, and there are several new adventurers in the lists. Mr. Gelb is one of them. [From a review by R. Campbell Thompson in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Oct. 1934) 833-42]